Just to Prove I Really Am Writing a Book

I have devised a simple test to figure out whether a co-worker is full of crap. Pose this question: "What is the one thing we can do to improve our business?"

Potential answers:

a.) "Understand our market. The Japanese have an expression: 'The customer is God.' We can learn from that."

b.) "We can't do one just thing. We have to do 100 things at once or we will perish."

c.) "It's mission critical that we create a new, pro-active, enterprise paradigm. We need to get out of our silos to drill down to the organizational DNA and seamlessly leverage our tactical, logic-based synergies to roll out our new strategic, re-engineered solutions. The result will be a totally relational, win-win, outside-the-box integrated scenario to measure team-based competence."

d.) "We need to wow our current customers, reconnect with former ones and invent unique ways to attract new ones."

If the answer you get resembles "C," run, don't walk, in the opposite direction. You are clearly dealing with someone who couldn't find a "Clue" in the game aisle at "Toys R Us."

Our friend offering the "C" response is merely blathering some meaningless jargon he or she picked up from a book or a magazine (or online). Aimless and completely free of a philosophical foundation, this type of person hopes to appear intelligent by parroting the latest babble uttered by this week's gurus hawking their genius for $29.95 in book or iPod form. Worse, if this person is in a leadership role, this week's solution is next week's memory because a combination of low-self esteem and ADD will keep this type of manager in an endlessly vague search for a simple solution to a complex scenario.

The Scenario "C" Speaker, a business jargon term I just coined (see how easy!) for my book, comes in many shapes and ages and genders. This person's obvious impotence in developing a coherent business plan, retaining a loyal team or inspiring workers often leads to systematic chaos. The Scenario "C" Speakers out there also share one other important trait: They are bereft of innovation. Their idea of innovation is to slavishly follow an industry trend or hide in a book until they discover a notion that they can pass off as innovation. Which, of course, means they have now bastardized a phrase containing that word: "disruptive innovation."

"Disruptive innovation" is a concept credited to Harvard Business School professor and frequent Forbes magazine contributor Clayton M. Christensen and is featured in several books and articles, most notably 1997's "The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail." Essentially, Christensen documents the impact an emerging technology can have on existing methodologies i.e. digital photography's impact on film processing. In the newspaper industry, this concept is often cited in discussing the Internet's impact on print media.

There are pro's and con's to Christensen's concepts, but he clearly has an unique viewpoint. For a more in-depth explanation:

Disruption is Good

The jury is still out as to whether "disruptive innovation" is a bonafide theory or a passing fancy. John C. Dvorak has his doubts:

The Myth of Disruptive Technology .

My view on Christensen's work is evolving. However, I think he suffers from too short of a view. The irony in today's business climate is that the one luxury an organization does NOT have is time. However, in his early work, Christensen was too quick to cite specific companies as failures in his model. For instance, he held Apple up as an example of a failed disruptive technology because the company eschewed open-source methodologies and maintained a proprietary control on its technology. Yet, a decade later, Christensen picked Apple's iPhone as the odds-on favorite for disruptive technology of 2007. And the iPod is clearly a disruptive innovation.

Christensen once wrote: "Apple remained proprietary and lost its chance to dominate the world computer market." That's the short view. In the long view, Apple maintained the computer market would eventually be weary of the gear-head mentality so prevalent in the early 1990s and developed the plug-and-play, intuitive machines of today.

The problem with a "short view," and the time needed to properly assess a disruptive innovation, is that it leaves a wide berth for all sorts of interpretation. Then there is the great potential for Scenario "C" Speakers to completely misuse "disruptive innovation" altogether. Instead of actually applying the principles to realign and regroup to better serve and attract customers, the weak management styles of Scenario "C" Speakers can be the sole reason that workers are driven away or that the organization is mired in financial chaos – and it might be completely unrelated to innovation, real or imagined.

Yet, when questioned, they will surely argue that their latest "pro-active, enterprise paradigm" is just so mind-blowing, some workers have to be forced out because they just can't keep up. Unable to admit their own lack of focus, they'll, instead, cite the need to improve "team-based competence." They'll also say that "disruptive innovation" has lead to "new strategic, re-engineered solutions" that will have a "short-term impact" on profits.

And either I'm psychic, or I just laid out a whole bunch of first quarter reports...

My suggestion to Wall Street and CEO's and boards of directors: Don't let the jargon wonks and the Scenario "C" Speakers get away with blaming their staffs or excusing budget short-comings on "disruptive innovation." A critical eye must be reserved for such attempts at rationalization. Disruptive innovation could be a new methodology to evolve an organization and enable it to survive a business climate superchanged by a technological revolution or it could be yet another trendy business axiom reduced to excuse babble promulgated by the weak-minded attempting to sound smart.

For more on the true impact of bad business jargon:

Six Worst Business Books

More later,


Mark